One of the biggest challenges to becoming the best we can be is the personal blindspot. These sneaky spots where, for one reason or another, we are unable to see a situation clearly or even at all.
Imagine for a second that you have a gym routine that you like. You do arms on Monday, legs on Tuesday, back on Thursday, and abs every day (because clearly, you are a masochist in this story).
If you are like most people, it’s likely that certain muscles just slip through the cracks. There are many reasons, but the result is that there are certain muscles (usually small stabilizer types) that just don’t get the same kind of exercise that the others do.
This can leave your body with imbalance, tension, and in extreme cases injury.
These are parts of ourselves that we will be unable to strengthen simply because we can’t “see” them. This can leave you feeling stuck, blocked in certain areas, and (worst of all for growth-minded people like us) getting the SAME results over and over.
Note before reading: If you discover that you are experiencing (or rather, have not been experiencing) any blindspots there is nothing wrong with you. Our brains are doing their best to keep track of a lot of complex information. There are bound to be areas where things get overlooked. As is my usual stance, I’ll remind us all to be gentle with ourselves.
Here are three major kinds of blindspots and what you can do to shine light on them and make a shift.
Habituation Blindspot
Habituation is a fascinating cause of blindspots. It is the tendency to ignore stimulus that is ongoing and unchanging. For instance, you probably aren’t aware of the sensation of the chair on your butt right now, well… now you are, but you probably weren’t before I mentioned it. That’s habituation.
This happens because our brains have evolved in a VERY complex environment. It’s pretty much chaos out there. Our poor little brains are doing there best to categorize and pattern-match… you know… everything in existence. And… it’s hard! We habituate to set things on “the back burner,” so that we can focus on more pressing experiences.
Check your blindspot:
Awareness is key. Get curious about things that you take for granted in your life. You might try practicing meditation, recording yourself talking, or taking a video of your walking and body posture. Find ways that work for you to become aware of your habits, what triggers them, and what patterns run after the trigger.
NOTE: Habituation can also be a cause of major dissatisfaction in life. We tend to not notice how far we have come because we become habituated into our new more developed state, which leaves us in a perpetual state of lacking.
Avoidance Blindspot
This blindspot is a protection mechanism.
If our avoidance mechanism is working at full capacity, you won’t even know that you are avoiding something. When it comes up the mind seems to just slide off of it, like the moon on a cloudy night.
For instance, I know a certain smoker. Whenever the topic of the health effects of smoking come up, or the topic of pain associated with smoking comes up, there is usually some sudden change of subject or attention-demanding event. Did I forget to turn the stove off?
Her subconscious mind is doing its best to protect her from pain. And it’s doing a really good job. I mention that because it’s nice to honor these parts of our selves. Her brain is trying to protect her from pain.
As with an anesthetic, she becomes numb to parts of her experience.
Check your blindspot:
This distraction blindspot usually requires some high energy to cause a shift of attention (something has to overcome the momentum of the conversation, this usually requires energy being added), so one way to notice this is to look out for spikes of energy in a conversation.
If you find yourself suddenly distracted, take a second to check-in. Get curious about any discomfort that you notice in your body. Think about what you were just talking about.
Explore your experience for subjects you never seem to finish a conversation about. This can point to the Avoidant Blindspot.
Paradigm Blindspot
This one is perhaps the most challenging one to work through on your own. A Paradigm Blindspot is a situation in which the world view itself hides a part of reality. For this reason, it can be devilishly difficult to penetrate this blindspot by yourself.
An example of this is not believing something is possible. Before Roger Bannister ran a mile in under 4 minutes people literally thought it was an impossible feat. The human body simply could not break that barrier.
Two months later someone else was racing against Bannister and that guy broke it as well. Before that day in 1954, there was a collective blindspot of belief.
For the entirety of human history, no one had done it and now it happens regularly. The record is now 17 seconds faster!
That is the power of a Paradigm Blindspot.
Check your blindspot:
As mentioned, this is the most difficult blindspot to pierce because it is your own belief system that is obscuring reality. Seeing your way out can be a bit like trying to see your own ear canal because it’s the very language that you use to describe the world that holds the secret to these blindspots.
For that reason, it’s best to get help if you want to identify paradigm blindspots. This is one of the major reasons that the life coaching profession is growing so quickly. The transformation that people experience when they break out of a Paradigm Blindspot can seem almost magical.
It’s the difference between solving a problem and realizing that a problem never really existed in the first place.
Blindspots are necessary obstacles to human development. No matter how much your mom might have tried to convince you that she was, none of us are all-knowing.
There will always be parts of our lives that are difficult to see. Even the act of remembering that you might have a blindspot in the first place is the first step to a lucid shift.
